This disclosure generally relates to providing access to applications provided by third party systems to online system users, and more specifically to allowing online system users to use an application associated with a third party system prior to installing the application on a client device.
Users of client devices often access third-party systems via applications associated with the third party systems executing on or associated with client devices. Often, applications associated with different third party systems require users to separately provide information identifying the users to applications associated with different third party systems. This results in a user maintaining separate information identifying the user to different third party systems. Additionally, as part of allowing a user to access content or services, many third-party systems requires a user to provide some amount of information identifying the user to a third party system before the third party system provides content or services to the user. Thus, conventional methods for providing an application from a third party to a user require the user to provide the third party system with some information identifying the user to the third-party system.
Some online systems may provide their users with a single sign-on type capability to access third party systems, where a user of the online system provides information identifying the user to the online system, which subsequently communicates with the third party system to identify the user to the third party system. Conventional online systems providing single sign-on functionality provide third party system with some information personally identifying an online system user accessing the third party system (e.g., email address, name, profile image, etc.). Thus, conventional methods for a user to interact with an application associated with a third party system require the user to provide some information personally identifying the user before the user is able to interact with the application associated with the third party system.